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As said in the title, e4 0.9 tech preview is out… What is it? Ok, if you’re not totally Eclipse addictive (like me ^^), maybe you never heard of it. So e4 stands for Eclipse 4. It means that there is a major modification of the Eclipse Platform. 0.9 tech preview means that it is an official version for preview of what such wonderful things it will provides. You want a quick overview of some of these new things? Ok, let’s go 🙂

The most visual improvement is… the UI ^^

And one of the great feature is that you can now customize the visual of each component just using CSS . Yes just like web pages but for a desktop application.
I think there are two main goals of that :
– A customizable UI of Eclipse and subsequently, of RCP applications.
– Facilities to create a web and desktop application based on the same code, you can adjust rendering with CSS.

For instance you can look about the demos provides with the released version and checked out the custom UI.

Using a simple Command inMenu, you can choose different CSS, no need to restart your application :

One another noticeable improvement is the modification of the resource management (IResource). A better mangement of nested project and linked resource can be used. By instance you can create logical group of projects.

Even if it is a 4.x version, Eclipse 3.x is compatible!! There is a compatibility layer in e4 to support 3.x plugins.